Category: Fun Stuff

Moore was inspired by Stonehenge and the shoulders of a man, but sometimes the Arch appears to be marching across the plaza.

In the early 1970’s the Henry Moore sculpture Large Arch was installed in front of the Bartholomew Co. Public Library.

At the time, I fancied myself a poet. I sat on the steps of the library one day and just watched the public as they came to see and experience the new addition to the Columbus art scene.

This past Sunday I went down to visit the Arch and sit in the sun and as I did so, I remembered the poem. When I got home, I dug it out and read it and decided it wasn’t too bad…thought I’d share it and some photos I took.

Not feeling especially inspired this week, but I feel I owe myself to keep writing, so I gathered together some quotes and thoughts on words.

I love words, their meanings, their twisted logic. If you think about language and just how far we have come from the prehistoric grunts of our ancestors, you should be amazed at the number of words and meanings we have developed to attempt to communicate.

And yet so often we fail. Maybe we forget that words are just words without meaning and context to go with them. I started thinking about this the other day when I was watching a news clip about a project that brought criminal offenders and victims face to face.

Victims of crimes are often full of hate and the need for revenge, while criminals are often remorseless and defiant. Yet in many cases, with the proper preparation, bringing the two together to talk out the issues of why a crime occurred and/or how the crime has affected both parties, a sort of calm acceptance can take place.

It is the combination of words, physical presence and eye contact that equals communication. Let’s try to remember that.

Anyway, off my soapbox and on to the fun side of words. Hope you enjoy the following “facts” about words and language. If you do and let me know, maybe I’ll find some more fun facts!

Fun with Words

It took the editors of the first “Oxford English Dictionary” five years to reach the word “ant.”

Umchina, a Korean term meaning “mom’s friend’s son,” is used to describe a person who’s better at everything than you are.

Editor Bennett Cerf challenged Dr. Seuss to write a book using no more than 50 different words. The result? “Green Eggs and Ham.”

The Scots have a word for that panicky hesitation you get when you can’t remember someone’s name: tartle.

Tsundoku is the act of acquiring books or other reading materials and not reading them.

The term “lawn mullet” means having a neatly manicured front yard and an unmowed mess in the back.

Many years ago, “jay” was slang for “foolish person.” So when a pedestrian ignored street signs, he was a “jaywalker.”

In 1974, the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis published a paper titled “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block’.” It contained a total of zero words.

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of long words.

Javier Santana writes:

In Spanish, French and Italian, “decisions” are something you “take” like a train that leads you somewhere new, whereas in English you “make” them like little pieces of your own creation. But in German you “meet” them, like friends.

The writer Philip Gulley cracks me up. Gulley has written several books and he also writes a monthly column in the city magazine, Indianapolis. His take on life is a wry, dry, take-life-as-it-comes sort of wide-eyed optimism that I can fully identify with. He can see the humor in every situation…even if that humor is ironic and off kilter.

I recently read an article Gulley wrote about being without the internet for three days. The article featured a litany of things he never had in his childhood and early life, but now cannot live without. (Spoiler alert, the internet was not one of them.) It might help you to understand Gulley to know that bungee cords were prominent on this list.

Anyway, the article (and this being November, the month of thankfulness (in spite of elections)) got me thinking about things I use in my life and for which I am not sufficiently thankful.

Google came to mind. I doubt that there are any of my readers who don’t know what Google is, but I try to use my mom as my target audience and she would require a bit of explanation if I started any conversation with the word Google, so let me briefly explain the noun/verb Google.

To do that, I’ll have to use Google. According to Wikipedia (that’s a definition for another day), in technical terms, Google is a search algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Development began sometime around 1996, and at the time it was being developed, Google was tentatively named “BackRub.” I do not know why. No one ever should try to guess where these technical types come up with names for their projects. Anyway, the company that became Google was actually launched in 1998.

I can imagine a sort of blank look as I make this very unhelpful explanation to my mom…what’s a search algorithm? Let’s see. My aunt was a librarian for all the years of my childhood. If I ever had to know anything, I could catch a ride downtown and climb the stone steps of the Carnegie library in my town. At the top of the steps, I entered a very special world with its own special smell and a quiet, peaceful authority. My aunt’s office was behind an official looking wooden checkout desk and I had the special dispensation to walk up to that desk and ask if Aunt Kathryn was available. She always was. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was in for everyone…I had no special “in” with her.

I could ask Aunt Kathryn anything. She didn’t know everything, but here’s the thing…she knew how to find out anything. And she didn’t just give me an answer to my question, she pointed me to the card catalogue or the reference section which gave me, not an answer, but several answers, from which I could draw my own choice answer, right or wrong.

That’s Google.

You ask Google a question, any question, and Google will go out on the internet and search for an answer. It will usually return hundreds of thousands of possible answers, but based on that algorithm we don’t really understand, the best answer to your question can usually be found in the first 5 or 6 possible answers.

This service does not cost a penny, but there are some pretty significant costs for using it. Just so you know, Google keeps track of your searches and of you, and you are likely to see an ad for whatever you last searched for pop up on the next internet page that loads. Lately, I’ve notice that when I go to a brick and mortar store and look at a particular item, that item also pops up in future ads on my internet. I’m not sure how that happens, but I think that’s Google, too.

The lesson is that, sort of like I wouldn’t ask Aunt Kathryn for certain bits of knowledge I did not want shared with my Mom, I don’t ask Google everything I want to know.

Thanks, Mr. Gulley, for making me think about this. Google is great and it’s one of the things I am thankful for this November.

Even if it does scare me just a little.

Things I found out from Google when researching this blog:

A Carnegie library is a library built with money donated by Scottish businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. At one point there were over 3,500 Carnegie libraries in the US. I was disappointed to find that Google couldn’t tell me how many are actually still in operation today. The one in my hometown, Aunt Kathryn’s library is.

Philip Gulley lives in Danville, Indiana. He’s a Quaker pastor who is the son of a Catholic mother and a Baptist father. That right there is grist for a lot of stories! He’s a writer and a front porch philosopher with a very Hoosier outlook on life. There’s a lot more about him online, you can Google him if you want to know!

The name Google is a variant of googol, a word that sort of means very large numbers.

There are at least 14 other search engines you can use besides Google. I also like Dogpile and Duck Duck Go (as I said, don’t ask me to explain where tech people come up with these names…but you could Google that, too).

This is a true story of a sorta bad day turned kinda nice by one guy with a simple mission, and I think it’s important to share.

Bad days come in all shapes and flavors and this one was just mildly bad…troublesome traffic, stores that didn’t have what I needed, annoying phone calls, a schedule that could not be conquered.

I don’t often eat in at fast food restaurants. Fast food is something you grab to take home, but on this day, for some reason, maybe because I was starving and yet had more errands to run, I decided to eat in. It was the middle of the afternoon, there were only two cars in the lot. I thought this could be pretty quick and I’d be on my way.

As I entered, a young man who had been mopping the floor held the door for an elderly woman in front of me and then for me. As we entered, he cautioned us about the wet floor.

He came in the store behind us, went behind the counter, washed up and then took our orders. The elderly woman (I’m old, but I’m not elderly yet!) went on to get her drink and her meal. I ordered and as I fumbled for my money, the young man started telling jokes: “Do you know what the fish said when it swam into the concrete wall?” “No.” “Dam!” said the young man. I smiled, handed him my money and prepared to move on…but not before he got off a couple more pretty good jokes.

After I got my drink and my meal, my mind was full of muttering about the day I was having when I noticed that the young man had come out from behind the counter and was finishing his mopping. As he went past me, he said, “You’re probably going to get tired of me, but I have a million more…” and he proceeded to tell me about the guy who went to a costume party with a girl strapped to his back. The host said “this is a costume party, what are you doing?” “This is my costume…I’m a turtle.” “But you have a girl strapped to your back.” “I know…that’s Michelle.”

Now that one made me chuckle, and by this time, I was feeling less stressed about my day, so I asked him how he came up with all these jokes. I never expected what I learned next.

He’d been in a serious accident some years earlier, suffered pretty critical injuries, some brain damage. Unable to work or care for himself while recovering, he moved back in with his mom. After many months, as he got stronger, he began volunteering at a food site and over time was hired as a permanent part time worker at the site. When he was able to go back to work, he continued to work at the meal site and also got a job as a cashier at a dollar-type store.

He said that as he worked with the public, he began to realize that everyone had their problems. In his words, “You only encounter these people for a short time, you don’t know when they go out the door, what kind of life they’re going back to. So, I figured if I could just put a smile on their face, it might be the highlight of their day. When I worked the checkout, I even carded a lady for toilet paper.” “Did she laugh?” I asked. “No, she got pretty ticked, (comic pause) …but her boyfriend thought it was hilarious!”

I know one thing for sure, that guy, in his humble job at a fast food restaurant, sure put a smile on my face that day, and I left with a renewed appreciation of the fact that since we don’t know what kind of life others have, we should just go with “Be kind. Make someone smile.” What can it hurt? We may be the highlight in their day.

You know how it is. You’re just about to sign off and something catches your eye, makes you go “Huh?” and you’re hooked for another hour or so. The other day I scanned a news item about the new laws that would go into effect in Indiana on July 1 and had just such a moment.

Illustration by Arwin Provonsha, Purdue Department of Entomology

It wasn’t the announcement of a new state insect…I have a real soft spot for Say’s Firefly, also known as pyractomena angulate or more commonly here in southern Indiana the lightning bug. Great choice. There’s nothing like a summer evening, dusk falling, kids still out playing and then…that first flash. Then another. Suddenly the kids are running around, jumping in the air, begging for jars with holes punched in the lid. What kid hasn’t dreamed of collecting enough lightning bugs to fill a jar and light their room at night? Lightning bugs are the most benign, gentle and rewarding bugs I know.

But the notice that the lightning bug is now Indiana’s official state insect isn’t what caught my eye (no pun intended). What actually grabbed my attention was the new law that makes eyeball tattoos illegal.

Wait…what?

I asked a young co-worker about this and it turns out this is a very real “thing,” tattooing one’s eyeball. I was young once, and I did some very stupid things both as a youngster and as a supposedly mature adult, but two questions come to mind…1) who would want this done and 2) who would agree to do it? Oh, and question #3…what could possibly go wrong?

Anyway, this triggered an interest in seeing what other wacky laws got passed this year, so here are some interesting ones:

Sunscreen: Public school students are allowed to carry and use non-aerosol sunscreen without having to provide a doctor’s note to their school or store their sunscreen in a specific school location. School personnel also can help students apply sunscreen with the written permission of the student’s parent. (Senate Enrolled Act 24)

It’s just a shame when common sense has to be legislated, don’t you think?

Soft Skills: Indiana schools must include employability skills in their curriculum, beginning in the 2019-20 school year. The specific “soft skills” to be taught, such as on-time arrival and ability to take direction, will be decided by the Indiana Department of Education and Department of Workforce Development. (Senate Enrolled Act 297)

Seems a shame we have to have a law to teach these skills…and have to mandate the schools to do it…just saying’.

Cursive: School corporations are explicitly authorized to teach cursive handwriting as an optional curriculum component. That’s already been the practice since 2011 when keyboarding instruction replaced cursive in the state’s educational standards. (House Enrolled Act 1420)

Whew! They haven’t outlawed cursive yet and schools can teach it if they want to. Good to know and also good to know there is a law to make that clear!